intro

The camera is not just an objective eye, but an instrument to enlighten and inform, a stimulating force to influence opinion and sometimes to speak for those with no voice.

Before television brought images of conflict and famine and environmental disaster and political upheaval into every living room almost as it happened, photographers were the eyes of the world, often the first to show what was happening in far-flung places and feeding the public's hunger for information. Today photographers cab no longer be first with the news, but their pictures continue to stir an increasingly cynical world and continue to bridge the divide between journalism and art.

Brilliant photographers are not necessarily brilliant businessmen; indeed one could reasonably argue, that someone engrossed by photography, by art, design and composition, is unlikely to be well equipped to run a business of any degree - of which I'm a prime candidate. Those who consider themselves to be serious photo-journalists, engaged in the important taste of documenting history and trying to help people understand an increasingly confusing world, have little time for their fellow members involved in the struggle to produce art, and business. The 'art photographers', in turn, can barely disguise their contempt for the grubby business of servicing popular magazines.

Some of the century's most memorable still images, among them Robert Capa's death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Henri Cartier-Bresson's picnic on the banks of the Marne. Dennis Stock's picture of James Dean in Times Square, René Burri's iconic portrait of a cigar chewing Che Guevara and Sebastião Salgado's unforgettable essay on the gold miners in Brazil. Phillip James Griffith's courages coverage of Vietnam more than almost any other factor, opened up the worlds eyes to what war was doing to the benighted Vietnamese people.

The result is an incomparable standard of photography which captures life's beauty and tranquility as well as laying bare the face of inhumanity and suffering.

Do we as photographers, represent photo-journalism at its zenith - fearless, committed, intensely involved, passionate, demonstrating a sense of more purpose? I believe at best, we transform "bearing witness" into an artistic 'tour de force' that transcends journalism and occupies a revered place in the photographic canon. The price has been costly - numerous lives lost - yet still photographers may be found risking their lives at trouble spots around the world, following the advice o one of photography's revered members, Robert Capa, who died in Indo-China in 1954: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough"